KalpanaRam Gaining Access to the Radically Unfamiliar: Religion in Modern Times Abstract: Postcolonial critique instructed anthropologists to turn to history in order to integrate time into their discourse. Yethistoriography, even when under- taken from apostcolonial, subaltern standpoint,has foundered preciselyonthe challengeofdoing justicetoreligious subjectivity.How then is the non-religious scholartogain access to religious phenomena?Phenomenological understand- ingsofbody, temporality and place provide an alternative account of what it means to come to understand something.Seen from this perspective,disciplines such as anthropologyinfactrelyradicallyontime, on the capacity of the schol- ar’sbodytoslowlyeffect anew synthesisofbody, place and people. In the ex- pansion thattakes place lies the potential to come to understand, without any necessary involvement of consent or belief, the continuum between religious and non-religious experience. Keywords: modernity,historicaltime, postcolonial and feminist critiques of modernity,temporality of anthropological practice, phenomenology, bodilyac- cess to the unfamiliar,spirit possession, continuities of experience,religious agency The studyofcertain kindsofreligious phenomena can reveal our ownpresuppo- sitions preciselytothe extent that it places astrain on the categories we use. This is the orientation with which Iexplored the phenomenon of ‘spirit possession’ in my recent work (Ram 2013). Men and women in rural Tamil Nadu are capable of experiencing divinity and the dead not simplyasavisitation, but in their bodies, as amore or less explicit presence. Such experience has no unequivocal mean- ing – it mayconstituteaffliction or divinefavor.The interpretative challengemay be described as ‘ethnographic’ .Itisundertaken regularly as part of anthropolo- gy’songoing wager that it is indeedpossible to extend our knowledge even of culturalphenomena that are initiallyradicallyalien and unfamiliar to oneself. The methodsIemploy are alsoderived from phenomenology. In phenomenolo- gy,spirit possession would constituteanexemplary ‘limit case’,whereordinary presumptions that sustain us in everydayinteractions no longer support us. We can and do stave off the instability that ensues. We can dismiss the challengeor simplydiminish it by re-absorbing it into existing categories. If we weretotake spirit possession as agenuine phenomenon, it would profoundlycall into ques- DOI 10.1515/9783110450934-011, © 2017 Kalpana Ram, Published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM 192 Kalpana Ram tion anetwork of assumptions about what it is to be human, alive or dead, what it is to worship, what it is to be divine. Instead, we re-absorb spirit possession into the languageofconsciousness (‘altered’ states of consciousness,but con- sciousnessnevertheless),orinto the languageofbiology(measuringbrain activ- ity alterations to see if anything ‘real’ is happening). More frequentlystillwesim- plydismiss it as falsehood. We maynot be able to step outside our ownepistemologies, because they are in fact our ontologies. We apprehend the world not just cognitively but emo- tionally,affectively, and practically. Or – we could allow ourselvestobeunset- tled. My book titled Fertile Disorder.Spirit Possessionand its Provocation of the Modern (Ram2013) tries to persuade readerstocome on ajourney with me, through dense ethnographic exploration of what possession means for different women, in order to return to more common scholarlyand political preoccupa- tions, newlyenriched by new hypothesesand ways of re-imagining at least some of our assumptions. In the book Ideal with anumber of such preoccupa- tions such as gender,agency,the body, emotions, as well as justice. HereIwant to see if we can extend some of thosemethodsand insights to the themesofre- ligion, changeand history which are the binding themes of this volume. Foritis not simply extreme phenomena such as spirit possessionthatact as a ‘provoca- tion of the modern’.Something of that provocation seems to cling to all of reli- gion as farasself-consciouslymodern projects are concerned – whether these be political projects such as feminism, liberalism and socialism – or models of knowledge that take the methodsofscience as theiryardstick of truth. Religion does not have to do much to be constituted as aprovocation. Itsvery visibilityto non-religious others seems an eruption into aplace (the public sphere) and a time (the present) to which it does not belong.What does this reveal of our un- derstandingoftime itself?What understanding of time and of ashared present underlies this responseofsurprise and discomfort at every manifestation of re- ligion?Itisnot onlythat religion is being located in the past,itisalso being as- sumed that the past does not simplyflow into the present.Instead, the present is assumedtoentirely supersede the past.How might we think differentlyabout the relation between past and present such that even those who do not share the assumptions of areligious phenomenon might nevertheless aspire to gain aform of access to it? In what follows Itake up two bodies of work thathelp us think differently about time. First,Iturn to the highlypoliticized set of discourses bequeathed to us by forty years of questions and critiques raised by feminists, post-structuralists, and post-colonial scholars. All of these coalesceinone respect: they have all, in some form or another,interrogated the linear, progressivist self-imageofmod- Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM Gaining Accesstothe Radically Unfamiliar: Religion in Modern Times 193 ernity.Inturnthey share elements of an alternative model of history and of time. We may, after Foucault,describe this model as an archaeology of the present. The second bodyofwork Iturn to is the discipline of anthropology.This sits oddlyafter turning to the political critiquesfor inspiration. Forpostcolonial cri- tiques in particularhavetended to see anthropology as singularlylacking in an adequate sense of time. Anthropological traditions have been stronglyindicted for failingtoincorporate the time of colonial rule into their accounts of what they see and describe as ‘tribal’ societies for example (Asad 1975,103–120). The explicit models of time anthropologists have offered for the non-western so- cieties they have studied – as non-linear,cyclical time in India for example – might be seen from apost-colonial perspective as too homogenizing (Sarkar 2002,15), and as adding to a ‘time distance’ between the western ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Fabian 1983). In taking such chargestoheart,social changebecame acentral motif for an- thropology.Inmybook (Ram2013) Icloselyexamine the manywaysinwhich spirit possession has been positioned as an index or concrete expression of the tensions introduced by capitalism into apre-capitalist culture. In some cases, as in the factories of Malaysia (Ong 1987), the arrival or consolidation of capitalismtakes the form of new relations of production and new disciplines of work. Others follow the lead of Taussig (1997) in describing cultsofspirit queens as mimetic amplifications of different qualities of the modern state (Mor- ris 2000;Tsing 1993). My ownwork in rural India began in the 1980s directlycon- cerned with questions of social change, exploring the changingnature of the sexual division of labor with the adoption of new technology and capitalist rela- tions of production. Iwent on to research the involvement of women in projects of social reform and development,and the changingconditions under which women ‘came of age’,gavebirth and mothered. But the enigmatic qualities of spirit possession made me dissatisfied with extendingthis kind of analysis to every aspect of phenomena we encounter in the world. In this case it meant ig- noring the very features which weremost spectacular not onlytome, but to those around me in Tamil Nadu. What stood out for all of us was the radical changeinthe very people who were ‘entered’ by spirits. During such intervals, their behavior, gait and languagewould alter.Inthe shrines of Catholic saints wherepeople went to seek relief from the troublesome spirits, the Catholic dei- ties did battle with the demonic. In Tamil Nadu,the Christian powers shared cer- tain characteristics of the demonicworld. Like them, they too entered the bodies of humans,taking them as mediums in such confrontations. It is true that one cannot simplyremainwith the sensory and the spectacular moment even in order to explore the meaningsofsuch moments. Those meaningsturned out to be distributed across the interrelationship between diverse sets of practices Brought to you by | Macquarie University Authenticated Download Date | 1/31/19 5:28 AM 194 Kalpana Ram – some wereritual practices that took place in templesand in Christian shrines, others wereconstructions of gendered life cycles, yetothers wereconcernedwith death and its effectsonthe flow of life energies. The changes Icame to explore weremore personal, as possession brought changes to the livesnot onlyofthe person directlyinvolved, but of all who weretouched by it. In what follows Ifirst trace the kind of alternativespostcolonial and feminist critiquesforgedinrelation to what Ballard critically describes as the ‘preceptsor conventions of asingular historical consciousness,which is thatofmodern, pro- fessional, Western, or now global historicity’